It is less than 18 months since Britain’s Labour Party won a general election with one of the biggest parliamentary majorities in history. Such dominance, which inflicted on the Conservatives the worst electoral defeat in their 190-year history, should have given Sir Keir Starmer a smooth ride as prime minister for a while. Yet it is the recently formed populist, nationalist Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, which has led every major opinion poll since April. Now the question is: will Farage be Britain’s next prime minister? 

There are two ways of looking at the current state of British politics. The first is that this is an exceptionally unstable period, exacerbated by a sluggish domestic economy, sclerotic institutions of government and global instability. The mainstream parties have run out of big ideas, leading voters to look somewhere, anywhere, else. 

The past half-century has seen long alternating periods of single-party dominance: Conservative (1979-97), Labour (1997-2010) and the Conservatives again until last year’s rout. These marathons have drained the parties ideologically and worn down their leaders. Reform UK was only established in 2021, it still has a freshness and its leading figures have never held executive office, so they don’t have track records to defend. 

But the foundation of this narrative is that this too shall pass. Reform UK is a craze which seems all-conquering but is ephemeral. Nigel Farage is a gifted political communicator, but he is an opportunist demagogue, a huckster. He has the quick wit and survival instincts of a carny barker, but his past is littered with internecine feuds. If politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose, then Farage is a snatch of crude doggerel. 

Britain’s political institutions and culture are deep-rooted, recognizably those which emerged from the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, just as the two-party system began to take shape. The Labour Party, founded in 1900, displaced the Liberals as one of the two main contenders at the 1922 general election, but otherwise there is a reassuringly solid 350-year history of gradual evolution. Reform is a passing squall, not a revolution. 

The counter-narrative identifies a period of epochal change in which the 2024 election was the first manifestation of pressures which has been building up for 20 or 30 years. The promised benefits of globalization have been underwhelming; deindustrialisation has shattered traditional working-class communities and created generational unemployment; immigration has increased at an exponential rate, transforming the demography of many areas within a lifetime; and productivity has never recovered from the global financial crisis. 

These changes, it follows, have eaten away the class and ideological loyalties of the established political parties. “Left” and “right” — terms derived from the seating in the French National Assembly in 1789 — no longer mean what they did. Farage and Reform UK have navigated these changeable waters with skill, forging a new electoral coalition which is socially conservative, anti-immigration, nativist, suspicious of free trade and free markets and economically interventionist. It has gained an advantage on the ailing Labour and Conservative dinosaurs. 

If the second hypothesis is accurate, Farage may have still greater success ahead. He has captured a significant voting bloc among the electorate and does not carry the guilt by association for the tired, unsuccessful past. Nevertheless, in practical terms, he faces a vertiginous climb to become prime minister. 

Reform has only five members of Parliament among 650, and finished second only in another 98 seats, and it takes 326 MPs to achieve a majority in the House of Commons. True, its support in the polls has doubled within a year, from 14.3 percent to around 30, but its organization remains inadequate, with vetting of candidates a persistent problem. Additionally, despite some high-profile wealthy patrons, Reform is lagging behind Labour and the Conservatives in fundraising. 

Simply becoming the largest party in a fractured House of Commons would require growth of unprecedented scale and speed. Labour won its first seats in Parliament in 1900 but took more than 20 years to reach triple figures, nearly 30 years to break 200 and 45 years before it ever achieved an outright majority. If Farage managed all of that within five years, “seismic” would not even come close. 

Everything is unprecedented until it happens for the first time. In 2017, President Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche! won 308 seats in the French National Assembly from a standing start. But Farage, 61 years old, vigorous but a drinker and smoker, is impatient and dismissive of detail. He has only attended a third of votes in Parliament, while visiting the U.S. a dozen times. In addition, while his supporters put the “fan” in fanatical, six in 10 voters view him unfavourably. 

Farage is talking up his prospects: self-doubt is no part of his persona. During President Trump’s state visit to the U.K., the Reform leader was asked if the president saw him as the next prime minister. 

“He knows that. All the American administration are acutely aware of it. They think they see some similarities in what they’ve done and what we’ve done, and you know what, we speak the same language.” 

It is not impossible. But it is only 14 months into Labour’s tenure in government, and Reform may find that a run of good poll numbers is not enough on its own to start a revolution. If the next election does culminate in Farage waving from outside 10 Downing Street’s famous black door, it will be one of the biggest shocks in British political history. Possible, but the jury will remain out for some time. 

Eliot Wilson is a senior fellow for national security at the Coalition for Global Prosperity and the co-founder of Pivot Point Group. He was senior official in the U.K. House of Commons from 2005 to 2016, including serving as a clerk of the Defence Committee and secretary of the U.K. delegation to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly.

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